


Zombie Barbie Says You're It

by Barb Cummings (Rahirah)



Series: The Barbverse [107]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Domestic, F/M, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-20
Updated: 2009-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-03 11:30:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rahirah/pseuds/Barb%20Cummings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even vampires have mid-life crises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zombie Barbie Says You're It

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set in the same universe as _A Raising in the Sun_, _Necessary Evils_, et. al. (See the [Barbverse Timeline](http://sleepingjaguars.com/buffy/viewpage.php?page=timeline) for specifics.) It contains spoilers for previous works in the series. Mucho thanks to kehf, slaymesoftly, hobgoblinn, and bruttimabuoni for beta services!

Hot summer night, cicadas throbbing like a heartbeat in the trees, stars coming out overhead. When Lawson steps outside, Spike's lounging on the porch steps, one booted foot drawn up, the other stretched out down the front walk. He's got an axe braced against his knee and he's going over the blade with a whetstone, working in steady deliberate strokes. A cigarette smoulders between his lips, trailing a banner of blue smoke. Tobacco and honing oil perfume the air.

Out on the lawn the two youngest girls run and shriek with a couple of the neighbor kids, mobbing their older brother in some game that makes sense when you're ten. Connie's not there. Of course. If - no, it's when, now, isn't it? - Lawson inhales, he can scent the peppery traces of her anger, but she's nowhere in sight. He stands on the edge of the porch, staring moodily out over Buffy's roses.

Spike gives the axe one last swipe and examines the blade judiciously, testing its sharpness with the pad of his thumb. Satisfied, he sets the weapon aside, corks the bottle of honing oil, and fishes a pack of Marlboros from his pocket. Lawson accepts the unspoken offer, taps a cigarette from the crumpled embrace of cardboard and lights up. The pack's printed in Spanish. Mexican import, probably black market. It's getting damned hard to find decent smokes in the States these days, but as the master-in-all-but-name of Sunnydale, Spike's got connections.

Lawson takes a deep breath, feels the nicotine bite as he leans back against the stone porch-column, eyes closed. Aches and pains spring to life, muscle by muscle, as he relaxes - he's healing as quickly as he ever does, isn't he? It's hard to tell.

"Good dinner," he ventures at last. Tonight's the first decent feed he's had in what feels like months. Military rations are a denatured mixture of animal blood about as tasty as the plastic it's packed in. Savory, bloody-raw calf's liver, kill-it-yourself ferret and all the fresh, burba-spiced pig's blood you can drink is a feast. Connie Summers-Pratt may not be speaking to him, but she's apparently determined to feed him till he bursts.

Spike grunts amiable agreement. The two of them sit there smoking, a pair of lazy, well-fed brother-lions, letting dinner settle before Spike and Buffy head out on patrol. Lawson wonders if he should join them, or hang around here, hoping Connie will decide to reappear and favor him with communication in English rather than the cryptic feminine semaphore of huffs and glares she's used so far. Or if he should track her down himself - maybe that's what she's expecting.

"I think I fucked up."

"That so?" Spike exhales a dragon-plume of smoke. "Bit late for second thoughts."

"No! Not about - " Lawson coughs, draws a ragged breath, pounds a startled fist to his chest. "Shit. Sorry. New lungs."

Spike's look is both wickedly amused and oddly sympathetic. He holds out his hand, palm up, fingers curled. Makes a fist, muscles working smoothly beneath the pale skin. "Does take a bit of getting used to."

Lawson just nods. He doesn't know how to describe it, the difference in the way he feels, the fizz in his veins, the crazy urge to run and laugh and fight, the terrible, precious fragility of each passing moment. There goes a second. There goes another one, and another, and another - this, here, now, gone forever and there'll never be another exactly like it. He can't say it's better than being undead, or worse - but it's different, and he has the feeling that he's only begun to realize just how much.

He doesn't have to describe it. Spike's been there. It's been almost thirty years since Spike's discovery that Mohra blood could kickstart a vampire to life - not to humanity, not without a soul in the mix, but life. Spike was a couple of months shy of his twenty-ninth birthday when Drusilla turned him. He must be heading up on sixty, now. Threads of silver are multiplying in his unruly curls, and the slight curve above his belt buckle is a shade more noticeable than it used to be - thirty years of good dinners eventually take their toll. Lawson stares at the glowing tip of his cigarette. "I just...I didn't expect her to... I thought she'd be happy. I should have told her first, I guess."

And there's the rub. He's still Sam Lawson, with all the same problems he had before he tracked the Mohra demon to its lair. He's just Sam Lawson with a pulse. Spike's grunt is noncommital, but the cant of his scarred eyebrow suggests that in some cases, there's nothing for a bloke to do but batten down and weather the storms of his womenfolk. "Takes after her mum," is all he says.

Alex pelts by with five-year-old Jess whooping on his tail, menacing her brother with a scrofulous doll. He's a lolloping, floppy-haired, round-faced puppy of a boy in half-laced sneakers, a strangely sweet-tempered cuckoo in the prickly Summers-Pratt nest. Lawson tries to remember what it felt like to be that young. Maybe he never was - he was working full-time by the age of fourteen, scrambling for pennies in the belly of the First Great Depression.

Hurricane Jess diverts her path to pounce on her father, thwapping Spike across the chest with her doll and chanting "Nom, nom, nom! You're it!"

"I'm what, now?" Spike relieves her of the doll, dangles it by one ankle in mid-air. It's one of Connie's old Barbies, long since abandoned to the untender mercies of her younger siblings. The painted eyes stare and its perky smile leers madly as it rotates back and forth. Half its hair is missing, and its arms and legs are pockmarked with with the marks of tiny sharp teeth - teething vampires can do some serious damage.

"Zombie Barbie bit you!" Jess says, snatching for the plastic hostage. "You're __it!__"

Spike cocks his head and considers this, stubbing out his cigarette. "Yeh? What's in it for me, punkin?"

The others are crowding around now. Ten-year-old Vicki's eyes widen in horror at such casual transgression of the ancient laws of Zombie Barbie Tag. "Those are the __rules_,_ Daddy!"

"Oh, well, then, if it's the rules... RAURRRGH!" Spike vamps out (scales now, and horns, and still better-looking than the Prince of Lies) and surges to his feet, Zombie Barbie brandished like a cross in clawed hands, and they're all off, racing across the patchy, sun-browned lawn. Lawson sits on the porch and watches the man (loosely speaking) who just might be the most vicious street-fighter in Southern California rolling in the grass with a bunch of giggling kids. That could be me, someday, Lawson thinks, and it's a weird, weird thought.

Alex skids to a halt on the walkway, grinning, panting, overflowing with the boundless energy of sixteen. "Psycho-sister at twelve o'clock," he whispers, pointing.

Lawson turns, and catches the flash of movement along the hedge by the driveway. All of a sudden his heart's pounding - he's still not used to that, has to tell himself it's normal, more or less, there's no need to panic and vamp out over the shock of his own goddamn heartbeat. He tosses his cigarette to the ground (he should grind it out, but he's still technically evil, after all) and leaps the porch railing, clearing the rose bushes, and strides around the corner of the house.

Past Buffy's compact hybrid van, past Spike's mile-long monstrosity of a DeSoto, down to the very end of the drive, where Spike's Triumph and Connie's Harley sit parked in the tall shadows of the hedge. The kitchen windows cast bright golden squares of light out across the back yard. Lawson catches a glimpse of Buffy's shadow passing by the window inside, which is a relief; if necessary, he can yell for help. Connie's spread an oily towel over the concrete, and she's kneeling beside the Harley, fiddling with something in the engine. Her mane of wild curls is tied up out of her eyes, a chestnut waterfall down her back, and her expression is fierce. Lawson knows damn well she's faking it; Slayer eyes are good, but not that good. The second-hand Harley is her pride and joy, the first thing she bought with her own money, and she'd never risk ruining its perfect timing by poking at it in the dark.

He stands there, waiting for her to acknowledge his presence - of course she knows; she probably knew the minute he leaped off the porch. "Connie - " he says at last, and she rises and spins around in one smooth ferocious motion and punches him square in the jaw. Lawson staggers back, caught unawares, and breaks into a grin - she cares!

"You moron!" Connie hisses, flinging her camouflage wrench aside. It clatters on the driveway and skitters into the hedge; she's going to be pissed off about that later, because it's one of her good set. She advances on him, his grin only making her madder. Jess and Vicki, it's obvious even now, have inherited their grandmother Joyce's build - they'll be tall and willowy, one day. But Connie takes after her mom, five foot nothing of tiny, curvaceous fury. She plants both small strong hands on his chest and shoves. "You asshole! You jerk!"

Lawson keeps backing up into the yard, hands raised to ward off her blows - he'd better; they really fucking hurt, and he wouldn't have it any other way. He finally backs into the concrete bench by the back fence and sits down with a thump. Connie glares at him, fists clenched, jaw working, chest heaving - she fills out a black t-shirt a hell of a lot better than her father does, that's for certain, and will it piss her off even more that he's getting hard?

She lunges at him again, but this time it's to knock the air out of him with a rib-cracking hug, and apparently the erection is no problem. He hugs back, and then there's kissing, and it's strange and awkward because he's got to breathe now, but all the more urgent for that. Her fingers are undoing the buttons of his uniform pants, and her hand's down his fly, warm and hard and demanding, jerking him off as if he owes it to her. "Do not," she snarls between kisses, "Do __not__ give me any __bullshit__ about doing this for me!"

His thumb's found the seam of her jeans and she's writhing against him, soft little breasts jouncing against his chest, nipples hard and biteable beneath scratchy-soft cotton not wearing a bra oh God and there's still part of him old-fashioned enough to find that decadent. His mouth closes on her neck and his fangs ache in their sockets and holy Mary Mother of God the chip doesn't fire, because he doesn't want to bite her _that_ way, and he can't wait to find out how he does want to bite her -

"Condom," Connie gasps, and Lawson groans. He's forgotten all about that particular downside, and they're alone in a cruel, condomless world. "Fuck," she mutters, and slides off his lap. Her mouth is as hot and demanding as her hands, and he's coming before he knows it, cold and no longer dead seed spilling across his belly, thank heaven it's dark and if there's a God in it, don't let her parents walk in now. Not likely, when half the family could probably smell exactly what was going on, but even vampires like to maintain a certain delusion of privacy.

Afterwards they sprawl across the cool concrete of the bench, watching the pale city stars. It's not cold, but he gives her his uniform jacket anyway. He reaches into his pocket, pulling out a palm-sized stone, and tosses it to her. "Souvenir."

Connie examines the thing: a flat oval of cloudy red, crazed with a thousand tiny cracks and flaws. Bits of alien gristle cling to the back. "What is it?"

"Forehead gem of a Mohra demon. You have to shatter it, or the demon regenerates." The blood of a Mohra demon is the blood of eternity, the old texts say. Ironic, in a way, that the mouthful he swallowed took eternity away.

"You could have lived forever," Connie whispers, her fingers closing around the gem. "You could have never gotten old."

Lawson grimaces, thinking of her father's changing game face. "Vampires get old." He sighs. "I didn't do it for you. Or not just for you."

Connie rolls over, frowning, intense. "Then why?"

He holds up a hand, fingers spread against the stars. He can hear the rush of his own blood in his veins now, sure and strong and inhumanly slow. He can't deny there's part of him that wanted to impress her, wanted to do her father one better - Spike chose his mortality, yeah, but Spike's heart stuttered to life in a nice clean mad scientist's lab. He didn't have to wrestle the bearer of that gift to the death in a freezing cave off the Baltic to get it. "Living forever," he says at last, "It wasn't like I was passing things by. It was like I was stuck on an island in a river, and everything else was passing me by. You were passing me by."

"So you jumped in the river," Connie says, a little bitterly, "and now you're going to drown."

"Not right this goddamned minute," Lawson snaps back. "I don't know why you're so upset. You've got a father and a brother and two sisters in the same boat."

"And you think I'm happy about that?" Connie hops to her feet, tugging her t-shirt down over her breasts. "God, how can you be so fucking stupid?"

She whirls and runs for the house, and he hears the back door slam. A second later, through the kitchen windows, Connie's silhouette flings itself at her mother's, shoulders shaking in the tears she wouldn't show him. If he listens hard, he can hear what they're saying, but he's not going to listen hard. Jaw clenched, he buttons up his fly, straightens his shirt and heads back towards the front yard. He wishes he had a change of clothes nearer than his duffle back at the motel, but it's warm enough that the spunk will dry before he has to be anywhere important.

When he reaches the front porch, Spike's got Jess and Vicki in a mock-headlock, and Alex is piling into a VW Bug with half a dozen kids his own age. The driver is a young Sharpesi demon with pierced wattles - female, by the smell of her, but it's hard to tell with Sharpesi demons.

"Back by midnight, or I'll flay the lot of you!" Spike bellows after the car, and Alex waves blithe, heedless reassurance out the window as they putt away down Revello Drive. "Inside now, shoo!" he says to the girls, as Buffy appears at the front door, checking her stakes. "Your mum and I have to go kill things. To bed with both of you, and don't give your sis trouble, she's in a mood."

"Would you like to come along?" Buffy asks, in the tone of a mother who'd really like to have an in-depth conversation with the man who's just sent her daughter fleeing in tears. At least she doesn't seem to be working on the assumption that those stakes are destined for a new home in his chest; Connie's not a child any longer, after all, and Buffy's hardly one who can afford to throw stones about complicated love lives.

Lawson shakes his head. "I should get going. I only have one day of leave left, and I should stop by the Hyperion and check in with the old man before I head back to base." Lawson still thinks of the grim old man in Los Angeles as _sire_, though Angel's made it more than plain that he doesn't reciprocate the feeling.

Spike snorts. "Good luck. The old bastard's a bloody tortoise these days." He eyes Lawson up and down. "In the event your military lords an' masters aren't over-pleased that you've gone an' rendered their bullet-proof commando all mortal and vulnerable-like..."

"We've got some experience hiding people from the Initiative," Buffy finishes. "If you ever need help..."

Lawson nods. He can't imagine leaving the Army - his job's been what's kept him going for the last thirty years. Given him purpose. He can afford to lose Connie better than he can afford to lose it, but...General Finn isn't stupid. Someone in Ops, he's pretty certain, knows exactly what he's been up to these last few weeks.

"OK, then." Buffy gives him a little nod - and sets off down the street.

Spike lingers a minute longer, his eyes searching Lawson's face, and then he slings his axe over one shoulder and follows her. Together they melt into the shadows, moving like quicksilver in the darkness. Even these days, there's few vamps in Sunnydale or beyond who'd be stupid enough to take Spike on, and fewer who could hope to come out of the confrontation alive...but Spike's starting to get old. Lawson imagines him in another ten years, or twenty - curls more silver than brown, a wicked grin and a comfortable little gut. God knows, maybe grandchildren on his knee. And still tough as nails.

Lawson wonders what it feels like, getting old.

He guesses he's going to find out for himself.

END


End file.
